


Smile Like a Sectumsempra

by QueenOfTheQuill



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Luna sees what she sees, introspective Luna, it also doesn't have to be shippy, you can read it as pre Ginny/Luna if you want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-23 14:49:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15608649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfTheQuill/pseuds/QueenOfTheQuill
Summary: Ginny Weasley smiled like a sectumsempra.





	Smile Like a Sectumsempra

Ginny Weasley smiled like a _sectumsempra_.

 

Luna hadn’t known the right comparison at the time, had only known that Ginny smiled something like knives and axe blades and other things meant to cut, cut, cut away at whoever had stolen the happiness from the school she called home and the friends she called hers. It was only later, after the war, when Luna asked Harry why he sometimes looked at Draco Malfoy with ghosts in his eyes that she finally knew the comparison she had been looking for.

 

 _Oh,_ she thought, blinking as owlishly as ever. _That’s it._

 

Ginny was glass shards in the shape of a young witch, with anger and fear burning in her chest, bright enough that Luna could See it flickering at the corners of her eyes whenever Ginny planned the rescue of another child from the Carrow’s grip on Hogwarts. When the two of them and Neville tried to steal the sword of Gryffindor for Harry, Luna thought that this might almost be what Ginny was made for: a sword in her hands and an enemy to point it at and the fury to do what was needed. Except that wasn’t quite right. Luna knew that humans were fluids, despite their state of matter; they changed to fit their containers. Ginny’s container was made of wartime promises and curses in the hall. It was made of hope—a fire that they were slowly running out of kindling to feed—and the imagined knowledge of what they’d have to endure to come out the other side in what passed for one piece after a war.

 

When the Death Eaters took Luna on the train that was supposed to be taking her home to Christmas with her father, she had to shake her head frantically to keep Ginny from blowing up the car with all of them still in it. Fire was a liquid too, but sometimes it tried to reforge its containers. Luna wasn’t really sure her body would take kindly to melting down in the heat of Ginny’s rage.

 

After her rescue from the Manor, Luna stared at the ocean through the windows of Shell Cottage and thought about Ginny’s smile (something like knives and axe blades and other things meant to cut) and wondered what her own would look like if she could call it up onto her face. Perhaps it would be as twistedly, horribly beautiful as Ginny’s, but she doubted it.

 

When Bill flew into her room, saying that word had come from the Order that Hogwarts was under attack and, as she was an adult with the right to choose, did she want to come, Luna did not want to go. She was tired and worn so thin in spots that she thought nargles might be making away with bits of herself instead of just her things. She thought about how it wasn’t fair to ask children to defend the world from someone determined to destroy it.

 

Luna also thought about Ginny. She thought about an 11-year-old girl who no one noticed was waning like the moon in the sky as she was taken from herself by the ghost of a monster. She thought about Ginny blunting her edges to hold a few first years—two from Gryffindor, one from Ravenclaw, and one from Hufflepuff—who needed someone to hold onto as their world crumbled beneath them; Neville had his hands full, so it was Ginny who made herself soft for them.

 

Luna thought about Ginny’s smile, brittle and ready to slash at anyone who came too close (a word, there was a word somewhere in the world to describe it, and if Luna closed her eyes at midnight and _reached_ , she could almost taste it), ready to mock those who would see her on the ground. Luna thought about Ginny’s eyes when she smiled, how they seemed to be screaming. _Sectumsempra_ , she whispered to herself across the years.

 

“I’m coming,” she said firmly, taking Bill’s hand as he turned them both towards the edge of destiny and one girl who smiled like she meant to kill.


End file.
